Catholic medical group: ‘Impossible’ to ensure safeguards with UK assisted suicide bill

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Apr 8, 2025 / 16:42 pm

The U.K. Catholic Medical Association (CMA) is warning against a bill seeking to legalize assisted suicide, arguing the measure will cause patients to “fear for their safety” in the medical system.

In an April 7 statement, the CMA indicated that it is “committed to upholding the moral teachings of the Catholic Church as applied to the field of health care” and is “therefore fundamentally opposed to the legislation proposed in [member of U.K. Parliament] Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill.”

The group argued that it is “always wrong to make a direct attack on innocent human life.”

Leadbeater is sponsoring the controversial Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill that would allow terminally ill adults in England and Wales to choose to end their own lives with the help of a doctor. The bill is currently facing a delay in its implementation that could last as long as four years. 

The bill would “allow adults who are terminally ill, subject to safeguards and protections, to request and be provided with assistance to end their own life.”

“The term ‘assisted dying’ is used in a euphemistic way in the bill,” CMA said. “What it actually proposes is assisted suicide.”

The group argued that although suicide was decriminalized in England and Wales in 1961 because of its relation to mental health issues, “assisted suicide remains a crime which may attract a long prison sentence.”

The bill requires “that a person requesting assisted suicide has a clear, settled, and informed wish to end their own life,” CMA noted. The bill further stipulates that the decision must be “voluntarily without coercion or pressure from any other person.”

The Catholic group countered that it will “prove difficult or impossible to establish that these provisions have been strictly observed,” as it is “clear from experience in countries which have legalized assisted suicide that abuse of the regulations is not at all uncommon.”

CMA said this could lead patients “to fear for their safety within health services.”

“For Christians and non-Christians alike, the ancient, fundamental principle of absolute respect for human life has always been officially upheld,” CMA said. “In the Hippocratic Oath, which dates to several hundred years before the time of Christ, it states: ‘I will give no deadly drug to any, nor will I counsel such.’”

The bill, meanwhile, would “overturn the ethical basis of medicine” by forcing medical professionals “to take the lives of their patients.”

“The CMA would not endorse this under any circumstances and will always advocate for health workers to be allowed to act in accordance with their Christian principles.”

The group instead called for greater access to palliative care for the dying, which was originally developed in the U.K. but which the group said is “extremely poorly resourced by the government.” 

CMA “believes that adequate medical and nursing care during a person’s final illness is at least as important as at any other stage of life,” the group said. 

Rather than assisted suicide, the organization urged “major investment in palliative care services such that they become available to all who need them in the U.K., 24 hours a day.”